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Bargain-priced homes expected to drive Silicon Valley market next year

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Jose Mercury News - By Sue McAllister - Oct. 07 (News) - At a meeting of the state association of Realtors at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center this week, Appleton-Young on Wednesday predicted that about 527,500 previously owned single-family houses will sell in the state next year. That would be a 2.3 percent drop from the 540,000 properties that are projected to have changed hands by the end of 2009.

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Boston's Hancock Tower and the coming commercial real estate crisis.

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Daniel Gross - Sep. 06 (Special Report) - For most of its 34-year life, the Hancock Tower, which looms above its brick neighbors in Boston's Back Bay, has been the sort of place where money comes to be managed and protected. Its tenants include Ernst & Young and the investment firm Highfields Capital. The I.M. Pei-designed sliver of glass doesn't seem like a place where several hundred million dollars can vanish in a few months.[more ...]

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A superstar real estate agent plots his comeback

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Tamara Lush - Aug. 01 (Special Report) - It's the perfect Miami morning at Carlos Justo's penthouse — warm and bright, with luxury yachts powering through the sparkling blue Atlantic Ocean some 30 stories below. Justo, a 53-year-old real estate agent, has been awake since 3:30 a.m. but he shows no sign of fatigue. His eyes scan back and forth, from the high rise condos, to the water, and back to the condos. An assistant, sitting at a glass table with her back to the stunning view, is talking business. She wants to know whether he will receive any commissions or checks anytime soon.

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Historic Overhaul of Finance Rules

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Damian Paletta - Jun. 18 (News Report) - President Barack Obama urged policy makers to rewrite the rules governing U.S. finance, unveiling far-reaching proposals that would affect nearly every aspect of banking and markets. The White House hopes Congress can complete work on the plan by year's end. But it is sure to face opposition both from some on the right who say it threatens to throttle free markets and others on the left who say it doesn't go far enough. Some in Congress are cautioning against haste.

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Housing Bust Leaves Most Sellers at a Loss

Sun, 24 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Dina ElBoghdady, Dan Keating - May. 24 (Other) - Local Prices Expected to Continue Falling

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Obsessive Housing Disorder by Steven Malanga, City Journal Spring 2009

Sat, 09 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

City Journal - By Steven Malanga - May. 09 (Investigative Report) - Almost everything that the Times accused the Bush administration of doing has been pursued many times by earlier administrations, both Democratic and Republican—and often with calamitous results.

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Boom-years borrowing hits churches

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - Mar. 15 (News Report) - Add houses of worship to the list of casualties of the mortgage crisis. Foreclosures and delinquencies for congregations are rising, according to companies that specialize in church mortgages. With credit scarce, church construction sites have gone quiet, holding shells of sanctuaries that were meant to be completed months ago. Congregants have less money to give, and pastors who stretched to buy property in the boom are struggling to hold onto their churches.

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The worst recession since World War II? Shaping up that way

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

McClatchy - By Kevin G. Hall - Mar. 07 (News Report) - The government's report Friday of an 8.1 percent unemployment rate equals the jobless number that the Obama administration has projected for the entire year. Few economists think that optimistic projection will hold, and many think that more big job losses are likely, with grim implications for the housing and banking crises.

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Communities Slammed by Surge in Bank-Owned Homes

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Independent - By Mary Kane - Mar. 04 (Special Report) - Banks that received government bailout money are taking heat for spending billions of dollars on bonuses, executive pay, and lavish outings. But there’s another outrage that Washington seems to be missing: The growing number of bank-owned properties in foreclosure scarring neighborhoods across the country.

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Renters Lose Edge on Homeowners

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Nick Timiraos - Feb. 25 (News Report) - The relative cost of owning versus renting is swinging back in favor of homeownership in some U.S. markets, buoyed by several quarters of sharp declines in home prices. At the height of the housing boom, as home prices surged, demand for rentals started to rise as the gap between owning and renting widened significantly. Even after the housing market soured, apartment demand grew as former homeowners became renters, allowing landlords to push healthy rent increases.

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Quiet Countrywide Bailout Serves as Warning for Congress

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Independent - By Mary Kane - Feb. 09 (Special Report) - As the Obama administration launches a new bank rescue plan and prepares to overhaul the financial regulatory system, lawmakers will look closely at the lending practices of major banks and mortgage firms. But some think they also should probe the government-chartered Federal Home Loan Banks, which served as lenders of last resort as the credit crunch intensified - propping up the very banks that made the kind of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis in the first place.

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Freddie, Fannie Force Borrowers to Waive Legal Rights

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Independent - By Mary Kane - Jan. 16 (Special Report) - When the government announced in November that it would use mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to streamline loan modifications for possibly hundreds of thousands of borrowers, officials billed the idea as a fast-track program to fight foreclosures. What no one mentioned is that homeowners would have to sign away their rights to sue, if they wanted to get those loans modified.

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Housing Push for Hispanics Spawns Wave of Foreclosures

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Susan Schmidt, Maurice Tamman - Jan. 05 (Special Report) - California Rep. Joe Baca has long pushed legislation he said would "open the doors to the American Dream" for first-time home buyers in his largely Hispanic district. For many of them, those doors have slammed shut, quickly and painfully.

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Banks Got Bailout; Are They Making More Loans?

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

All Things Considered - By Wendy Kaufman - Dec. 30 (News Analysis) - With more money on their balance sheets, the thinking went, banks would make more loans, and that would help jump-start the economy. But it hasn't quite worked out that way.

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The beauty of bubbles

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Economist - By The Economist - Dec. 18 (Special Report) - So what about the rich world’s present miseries? Will the financial bubble that has just burst over our heads leave some legacy of lasting value? Searching for the positives from the recent debt binge may seem Panglossian. But the lesson of previous bubbles is that even the wildest manias may do some good. “You can start with misallocation of capital and stupidity and still end up with something useful,” remarks Mr Nairn.

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A case study in housing collapse

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

St. Petersburg Times - By Michael Van Sickler - Nov. 30 (Investigative Report) - Thousands of miles from the trading floors of global stock markets, an abandoned house in one of Tampa's poorest neighborhoods is an improbable place to learn about why the world's financial system is collapsing. But if you want to understand how we got into this mess, the stucco house at 4809 N 17th St. isn't a bad place to start.

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At Frontline of Foreclosure Crisis, Counties Go It Alone

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Independent - By Mark Kane - Nov. 25 (Special Report) - Places hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, like Prince William County, are dealing with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of abandoned and deteriorating properties like the Irongate townhouse — the damage left behind by the subprime mess.

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How deep a recession?

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Christian Science Monitor - By Mark Trumbull - Nov. 21 (News Analysis) - A surge in layoffs, a sharp pullback in consumer spending, and a credit crisis that drags on despite a massive government rescue have prompted some forecasters to predict the worst economic downturn since World War II.

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Ohio Postcard: Eviction

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Peter J. Boyer - Nov. 20 (Special Report) - Fatheree had already handled one forcible eviction that day, and the little white house was next on his list. The prospect made him a bit uneasy. In only the rarest cases—maybe one in a hundred—did eviction day arrive without his having had some contact with the resident of the home.

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Phil Gramm, Unswayed Champion of Deregulation

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Eric Lipton, Stephen Labaton - Nov. 17 (Special Report) - He blamed others for the crisis: Democrats who dropped barriers to borrowing in order to promote homeownership; what he once termed “predatory borrowers” who took out mortgages they could not afford; banks that took on too much risk; and large financial institutions that did not set aside enough capital to cover their bad bets.

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Is Treasury Secretary Paulson Running Out of Gas?

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Time - By Justin Fox - Nov. 13 (News Analysis) - Over the past two months, Paulson's public image has taken quite a beating. The former Goldman Sachs CEO entered September as the can-do dealmaker who seemed to have finally gotten the yearlong mortgage crisis under control. Now, after the expensive rescues of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, the failure of Lehman Brothers, and the painfully dramatic struggle to get a $700 billion financial bailout bill through Congress, he is a much-diminished figure.

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Home sales see biggest gain since July 2003

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Reuters - By Patrick Rucker - Oct. 25 (News Report) - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sales of previously owned U.S. homes rose 5.5 percent last month, the biggest gain since July 2003, and the inventory of unsold homes fell, a hopeful sign for a housing market mired in a long slump. The National Association of Realtors said on Friday that sales of existing homes rose to a 5.18 million-unit annual rate from the 4.91 million unit pace set in August. Economists had expected sales to rise to only a 4.93 million unit rate. It was the first time the sales pace had risen above its year ago level in nearly three years, a sign the market could be stabilizing. The surprisingly large jump in sales pushed the inventory of unsold homes down by 1.6 percent to 4.27 million, or a 9.9 months' supply at the current pace, the lowest since February. "We're not out of the woods yet by any means when it comes to falling house prices and our fundamental problem of an oversupply of homes, but we're getting near to the bottom every day," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

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Credit Rating Exec: "We Sold Our Souls to the Devil"

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Nick Baumann - Oct. 24 (Special Report) - Internal documents show that while rating firms publicly defended their practices, executives privately wondered when the house of cards would fall.

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Grim economic news from Britain, as world stockmarkets slump

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Oct. 24 (News Analysis) - The dollar’s recovery is a little harder to fathom. After all, the origins of the credit crunch lie in America’s housing bust, which has resulted in huge losses for banks worldwide on securities backed by souring American mortgages.

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Frank talk about the economy

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Ross Kerber - Oct. 24 (News Report) - The US economy is likely to bottom out early in 2009 and resume growing by the middle of the year if Congress passes a stimulus package soon and does more to help homeowners facing foreclosure, US Representative Barney Frank said yesterday. In a wide-ranging interview with Boston Globe editors and reporters, Frank emphasized the need for more government action to check a quickening economic slide. Despite a series of interventions over the last several weeks, stock markets around the world have continued to post steep declines, financial markets are still struggling with losses related to bad loans, and business activity at companies is dropping sharply. "If we get aggressive about reducing foreclosures and we pass a good stimulus package of upwards of $150 billion, then I could see this starting to turn around by next summer," said Frank, the Newton Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee.

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